foot-ball at the weekend, and that she had generally approved of what she saw. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. (Her usual leisure activities were playing tennis at a rather exclusive North London club and practising the clarinet.) ‘No, it was quite balletic,’ she said, her eyes wide in self-amazement. Apart from that, the footballing event that had impinged most on my consciousness was the Heysel disaster in 1985 - not because I understood how truly awful it was, but because I didn’t. At this time I had a crush on a chap in the office who made a perversely big show of adoring football, especially Italian football; and for some reason I always felt that he was putting this on. I thought he carried copies of La Gazzetta dello sport around just to annoy me (or possibly - which was worse - to arouse the interest of other men). Either way, I did not respect, understand or believe in his passion for football, and I remember a couple of days after Heysel asking him why he was still depressed.
The Times’s idea of sending an agnostic, literary, 41-year-old female survivor of colonic irrigation who’d always minded her own business to cover a bit of football in 1996 has to be set in context. And it’s quite simple, looking back. In the mid-1990s, football was mounting its bid for total domination of British culture - a domination that it subsequently achieved. Nick Hornby’s 1992 book Fever Pitch was responsible for making football respectably middle-class; Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports channels (launched in 1990) for flogging football as a seemingly limitless source of home entertainment. Everyone could see that football was breaking out in unlikely places in the 1990s. In the London Review of Books, for example, Karl Miller (the Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London; not the German footballer) wrote a hyperbolic essay on Paul Gascoigne’s World Cup performances in Italia 90, in which he described the flawed-heroic Gazza as, ‘Fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable…tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun.’ At the other end of the mythologising scale, on Friday nights from 1994 to 1996, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s laddish and brilliantly bathetic series Fantasy Football League (BBC2) placed football in the same friendly bracket as alternative comedy. Football’s traditional associations - male, tribal, anti-intellectual, hairy-kneed, working-class, violent, humourless, misogynist, foulmouthed, unfashionable - were being undermined from all directions.
Given all these signs and portents, it was naturally felt - by clever zeitgeist specialists such as Keith and David - that Euro 96 might be a tipping point. Match attendances, which had sunk to terrible lows in the 1980s (Tottenham had been playing to crowds of around 10,000) were already recovering thanks to the formation of the Premier League and the investment from television - but, basically, Après Euro 96, le deluge. In the context of all this, I believe my own small journey into football for The Times was a clever editorial decision: I would be a trundling wooden horse freighting a few new readers into the sports section. It was also, however, a deliberate and rather rash mind-altering experiment, familiar from films such as The Fly and (more recently) The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and I have sometimes wondered subsequently whether I ought to sue. No one thought about the consequences, least of all me. We merely thought: let’s connect the brain of this apathetic 41-year-old literary woman to a big lot of football, maximise the voltage and then see what happens. If she starts getting up during matches to yell, ‘Can we not knock it?’ then the conclusion is clear: football can appeal to bloody anyone. If she starts describing Gazza as a priapic monolith, however, things have probably gone too far, and it may be necessary to reverse the polarity.
But I agreed to do it, so there you are. And my first act as special know-nothing Euro 96 correspondent for The Times was to go out and get a book. I acted on the advice of a child, which seemed appropriate. ‘How should I prepare for Euro 96?’ I said. And the child said, ‘Get a sticker book.’ So I bought a special Euro 96 sticker book in W.H. Smith’s and the astonishing thing was: it was only a pound. Imagine my disappointment, however, when I took it home, shook it, and no stickers came out. Apparently you have to buy the stickers separately at considerable expense - something the child had neglected to tell me. But never mind. I was now committed to Euro 96. I had invested in it. And in the build-up to the event, I persevered with my research. I bought a magazine-sized glossy bbc guide to the championships, for example, which was packed with pictures of completely unfamiliar long-haired men doing historic things for their countries in very, very brightly coloured football shirts. Evidently, quite a few of these chaps played for English teams while artfully retaining their foreignness for international contests. I wondered how this could possibly work in practice. I also wondered, seriously, whether it ought to be allowed.
I also read every word in the supplement that came with The Times, bored to tears, and spent a long time studying the cover picture of Les Ferdinand with no shirt on, trying to memorise his chiselled features for later identification. (Since the injured Les played no part in England’s Euro 96 games, this turned out to be a waste of time.) Having nothing else to do until the games began, I pored over the results tables waiting to be filled in, speculating on their use. There were columns headed ‘W’, ‘D’ and ‘L’, for example, which I immediately deduced were abbreviations. Win, Draw and Lose was my guess. However, after ‘W’, ‘D’ and ‘L’ came columns for ‘F’ and ‘A’, and here I drew a blank. I searched the page for a key, but there wasn’t one. Damn. I couldn’t work it out. F? A? Even if it was to do with the number of goals scored - which seemed likely - how did that get to be represented as two columns? Dear, oh dear, there was so much to learn.
The good news was that the opening match (to which I would be going) was England v Switzerland. Phew. What a good idea to start things off playing a nation known not only for its keen neutrality and cleanliness, but also for its extreme tardiness in giving women the vote. In all my years of not really listening to sports news, I had never heard of England fans having particular antagonistic feelings towards the Swiss - not even for their disgraceful suffrage record. Moreover, according to my Euro 96 guide, Switzerland were not one of the great teams of the world, either, so they would probably be an utter walkover on the field, thus ensuring a nice successful opening game for the home side. At this stage, it had not occurred to me that the 15 teams competing alongside England in Euro 96 had all needed to qualify for the event - or, indeed, noticed that many, many other European countries were not represented at all. I never asked, ‘Shouldn’t Sweden be playing in this?’ or ‘Where is the Republic of Ireland?’. I just thought it was fitting that small countries with no chance at all were playing alongside big footballing nations such as Germany, England and Italy. It seemed to have been nicely thought out; someone high up in football had obviously sat down in the winter with a yellow legal pad, a sharp pencil, a cup of coffee and a biscuit, and selected this bunch of interesting countries to play against each other - a bit like planning a really big dinner party, but with less at stake if it went wrong.
Meanwhile, I waited. At the last minute, The Times supplied me with an intriguing electronic device: a special bt pager decorated with the Euro 96 logo which would, they promised, thrillingly vibrate to inform me whenever anything important happened (in case I missed it, I suppose). For the time being, however, this gadget was inert, lifeless - even when prodded. I wrote an introductory piece explaining how I had achieved my pristine ignorance of football over a lifetime of loudly running the bath, boiling kettles and singing tunelessly to the cats (‘La la la, What’s for breakfast today, La la la, Spot of Whiskas, La la la’) during the sports bit on the Today programme at 7.25 a.m. and/or 8.25 a.m. Then I finalised my preparations by asking my friend Robert to come with me to Wembley, knowing that he had an interest in football, and assuming he would snatch my arm off for a ticket. What a let-down, therefore, to discover that, while he would certainly be happy to escort me to England-Switzerland, Robert was a Sheffield Wednesday fan primarily, and not over-keen on international fixtures.
So that was it. On the fine morning of Saturday June 8, 1996, I set off for Wembley from Brighton station clutching a pair of tickets and a dormant pager, wondering whether I’d be able to recognise Les Ferdinand with his clothes on, imagining the tournament mainly in terms of social dining, and with a slightly under-excited friend in tow. Not great clues, any of them, to the fact that my world was about to be turned upside down.
I’ll
